8 Essential Black Friday Purchases to Make This Year

The holidays are a time of immense social pressure: You spend all year destroying your relationships with your friends and family in a variety of exciting and unprecedented ways, and this is your one chance to patch everything up. But how do you choose your gifts? The only things as prevalent on the Internet as porn are obnoxious gifts, so how can you ever be sure that you're getting your friends and family the gifts they really deserve?

Well, we at Cracked have spent the last few years scouring the Internet for everything interesting or noteworthy, and we're happy to say that we know exactly what you should buy. So bookmark this page and we'll see you in just under a month when you wake up in a panic, having completely spaced on holiday shopping until now. We promise that these are the most important gifts anyone could ever get. So from us at Cracked, Happy Every Holiday!

#8. The Gift of Great Sex

A good way to tell if your friends need this gift is if they're always bragging about their sex lives, because talking about how amazing their genitals are is pretty much the only surefire sign there is that someone isn't really getting any and is desperate for anyone to show them how. If no one's shooting up that conversational rescue flare, you can always just sleep with all your friends, pick the one with the least impressive performance, and give them a guide to better sex.

Marili Forastieri/Digital Vision/Getty ImagesThis will shock the stock photo people, but more than 70 percent of sex occurs above the ankle.

In that instruction manual, they'll learn that real-life sex is nothing like their sex education (i.e., Internet porn) taught them. For example, women are usually happy to provide feedback about sex, a smaller-than-average-size dick actually makes women more likely to want to bone you again, and sex, like Mario Kart, gets better with practice and never gets old.

#7. The Gift of Healthy Digestion

Why give someone a gift they can lose or break when you can give the gift of fixed innards? Studies suggest that the easiest thing for your system to digest is knowledge. For example, did you know that you're not pooping right? You've been pooping wrong your whole life and never knew it. Every loaf you've ever pinched has been an abomination, and not in the way you're thinking: See, the best position for pooping isn't actually sitting, but squatting, particularly for men, because sitting on a can is the equivalent of choking your prostate for a few minutes each day. Fortunately, there's some shockingly educational literature written on the subject, as well as a number of other things.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty ImagesAll this pain could have been avoided.

#6. The Gift of Healthy Self-Esteem

If you have a friend whose face resembles a colon and open parenthesis mashed together in an unholy union recognized by no known grammatical religion, that person needs an injection of confidence. Luckily, you can buy that now.

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For everyone who wishes there was some trick or shortcut to confidence, we offer good news: there is. See, the trick to feeling good about yourself is perspective. You need to understand that gaining a skill is more complicated than a montage (it takes years of dedication and hard work, not just for you, but for everyone); that your generation isn't the worst (your Jackass: Bad Grandpa is just the 1950s Three Stooges); and that you have an amazing sixth sense that can keep you from being eaten by bears.

#5. The Gift of Fiscal Responsibility

You know your friend who, despite having a steady job, is always broke? Always pining over new video games? Always buying extended warranties for his cellphones? Well, you have an obligation to help that poor sap, and we have just the thing.

The difference between getting control of your finances and never having enough money for food is as simple as understanding where your brain is doing you wrong combined with a little bit of luck (which, we should point out, has been generously slathered on this particular publication thanks to some shaky witchcraft). For example, if you've ever spent a whole bunch of money on something stupid and then decided to keep spending because otherwise that early money would be wasted, you've been deceived by your brain. The real way you should spend money isn't in steady streams, but in short, controlled bursts.